Pentagon Papers

The Pentagon Papers was a US Department of Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. In 1971, the RAND Corporation employee Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study, brought the papers to the attention of the public by leaking them to The New York Times. The Papers revealed that President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration had systematically lied to both the public and the US Congress, revealing that the USA had secretly enlarged the scope of the Vietnam War with the bombings of nearby Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and US Marine Corps attacks, none of which were reported in mainstream media. In June 2011, the entirety of the papers was declassified and publicly released.